Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer
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But BioWare games used to be the top tier gaming company standard for excellence. Bethesda used to release amazingly ambitious titles that were unmatched (albeit buggy!).
Greed outweighs the love of games.
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To quote an old RockPaperShotgun comment about Dark Souls, the best decisions are the ones that you don't know you're making. DS definitely has storyline changes depending on where you go first, what you do and who you speak to, which is far more natural than a two-way dialogue option for "blatant RPG decision making".
The tragedy of Elden Ring is that it's far too long for that. I've played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours, so can play through the various plot line resolutions in a long evening of gaming. ER has a variety of ways that the DLC can play out, you say? Best book a fortnight off work so that I can get a hundred hours of gaming in.
I’ve played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours
Do you think your experience here is at all the norm?
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The joke of these games is that they aren't notably more weird than titles Bethesda and Bioware were famous for turning out. Hard to get more weird than Fallout's more esoteric vaults or Morrowind's bizarre cults and exotic cultures.
BG3/KC:D have been, if anything, a direct successors to the old classics. They're faithfully propagating the ideas these old titles represented in a way the new studios are unable to reproduce.
Morrowind is over 20 years old, and there hasn't been a FO game with compelling plot lines since New Vegas. You are living in the past.
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Indeed, as the article writes
Even Skyrim—certainly a weird, ambitious, and janky RPG in its own right—refined and streamlined the formula set by Morrowind and Oblivion, rather than expanding on their eccentricities, and that trend only continued in the studio's following games.
Skyrim wasn't "weird" by any definition I'd use. More like bland.
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Morrowind is over 20 years old, and there hasn't been a FO game with compelling plot lines since New Vegas. You are living in the past.
Kinda the point of the comment
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I am sensing a lot of anger here and given the current state of the world it just seems so misplaced. Like dude, there is really shit going on with real villains and real people siffering, maybe direct that anger there.
"Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degree is arbitary. The definition’s blurred. If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all!"
Greedy CEOs, MAGA supporters, Islamists, Nazis, Tankies, all the same. If all of those people stopped existing tomorrow, then the world would undoubtably be a better place. I'm ready to die on that hill!
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If you're even remotely interested in Warhammer 40k, the Rogue Trader CRPG is excellent
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2186680/Warhammer_40000_Rogue_Trader/
I love Rogue Trader so much.
I wish more of the game was like act 2. That's where the game really shines
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Interestingly, Avowed is completely missing from this discussion.
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Interestingly, Avowed is completely missing from this discussion.
A very fair point, but alas… for better or worse, the bar has indeed been raised, and last month only proved that. February 2025 saw the release of a new RPG from one of the most beloved studios in the genre, Obsidian Entertainment. Avowed is modest by design, but nonetheless it's polished, accessible, and visually impressive, with a rich story from some of the best writers in the business—and the backing of Microsoft, one of the most influential and well-resourced videogame publishers of all time.
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Should I buy Baldurs Gate 3, its extremely expensive still.
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Kingdom Come Deliverance wasn't even on my radar and now I'm obsessed. The NPCs are so fucking funny
If I were in your shoes...
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If you're even remotely interested in Warhammer 40k, the Rogue Trader CRPG is excellent
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2186680/Warhammer_40000_Rogue_Trader/
Owlcat in general, despite their buggy releases, make absolutely ambitious and exciting games that are terrifically well written. Wrath of the Righteous is my favorite CRPG out there, and Rogue Trader is close to that as well.
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Should I buy Baldurs Gate 3, its extremely expensive still.
Its a regular price these days. Tho if your not in a hurry just wait for a pricr drop (can wishlist it on deals.gg to get notifed)
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Interestingly, Avowed is completely missing from this discussion.
I want to play it but it seems like a $40 game
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I concur; we need more of this new breed of aggressively strange RPG's, like earthbound/mother, planescape:torment, and morrowind.
The freedom that Morrowind gives you has never been matched by other Bethesda titles. I think the only path that's blocked to the player is joining the Sixth House, but at least you can kill Vivec before confronting Dagoth Ur
I can't speak for Daggerfall's freedom as I haven't really delved into it, but I know it has 6 different endings depending on which faction you ally with.
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With its nuanced characters, wonderfully layered world, and incredible depth of interactions, it was natural to feel the game had set a new bar for the whole genre—but it was pointed out that declaring it the new standard was unreasonable and unsustainable given how few other developers could possibly rise to meet it.
You could make a game a third of the size of BG3, and it would still be excellent value for BG3's asking price. And no, you shouldn't attempt to make a competitor with BG3 on your first try. Nor should you try to make a competitor to Elden Ring on your first try; FromSoft had been making those games for the better part of 15 years, building and iterating on what came before. I do think more RPG developers should strive to follow the systems-driven approach that Larian has and be cognizant of what it is that we all like about BG3, but it can be sustainable if you don't try to hit a home run on the first pitch.
FromSoft had been making those games for the better part of 15 years, building and iterating on what came before.
Longer, if we really want to get pedantic. King's Field, the game and series that is now the spiritual predecessor to the Souls genre, is from 1994, so we could probably say they have been refining their own flavor of action RPG for over 30 years now.
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the future of RPGs
Or, hear me out, the future might be 2D pixel-art games made by one or two people in a bedroom -- not by critical acclaim or player sentiment, but just by sheer volume, filling up digital storefronts.
Im almost done playing crosscode and i was floored away by how engaging and fun it is. I never thought id invest 60+ hours in it so willingly and eagerly. Honestly the best time ive had in gaming in a long time.
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Youve never played the original FF 7?
Half the options of the original FF7
I'm pretty sure nobody had the option to save Aeris, side with Sephiroth, finish blowing up Shinra before having to change to disc 2, etc
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I'm talking about the definition of the words "deep" and "shallow", here. Nobody said bg3 was the best or the worst game. Just that it's shallow. And most people agree that it's not.
And yes, there's issues, but none of the ones you've brought up make it a shallow game. And honestly, outside of act 3, and more specifically the ending, I haven't noticed any of the stuff you're talking about.
And what game gives you a more "evil" path than the one where you help the goblins kill a bunch of druids and refugees and get minthara as a companion. You can convince gale to sacrifice himself and blow up the whole party just for lulz. You can become an assassin of bhaal. You can get shadowheart to and astarion to become evil too, since those are choices as well. All the dark urge stuff, there's the kid in the druid grove that stole the idol which you can either save or let the mean druid bitch kill her. You can choose to either save or destroy the last light inn in act 2, bunch of people will die there as well.
Remember scratch? You can return him to his abusive owner. You can kill karlach.You can take over the netherbrain and use the absolute's army to conquer the world, you can wipe out Baldur gate's citizens memory and rule over them or you can make them kill each other. Or you can become a mind flayer and get everyone in BG to do the same and make them serve you
I could go on. But you've obviously made up your mind and I'm probably just wasting my time. We're not arguing opinions here, we're arguing facts. And apparently, for some people, fallout and kingdom come are deeper games even tho your second playthrough will be 90% the same and you only have like 4-5 meaningful decisions to make that only amount to whether you kill or not some guy and whether you side with some guy or another and then you get an either sad or happy or angry or neutral prologue at the end.
Is bg3 he deepest game ever? No, but it's not shallow either. In most RPGs, 1 playthrough or 2 are enough to see everything. Or better yet, 1 playthrough plus a 10 minute YouTube video or one wiki page that explains it in a few lines.
Only other game where the my second playthrough was more different than the first one was disco Elysium and even that wasn't like a whole other game or anything.
I'm talking about the definition of the words "deep" and "shallow", here.
Giving you choices does not add depth, it substracts it, the developers have to write twice as much content that you won't see, and because they have to account for each choice the story is much stricter in how it can evolve. Choices and replayability are opposites to story depth.
Anyhow, my argument was more about the fact that they don't delve beyond the surface of things much, even companions barely have a single questline each. It's very much a theme park crpg, everything has to be short lived and interesting lest they bore the audience.
