(2023-08-17) Yelling Is Not Journalism

Yelling is not journalism. IGN just released a video called “Baldur’s Gate 3 is causing some developers to panic.”

The crux of the video is a negative reaction to a series of tweets by Xalavier Nelson Jr talking about how Baldur's Gate 3 isn't a reasonable bar for most RPGs going forward.

The video instead asks a rhetorical question that has been posed ad nauseum since the advent of DLC: why can’t triple-A computer games come out with perfect polish from day 1?

Why CAN’T they do this, if the same question has been floating out there for nearly 20 years? Clearly this is not an easy answer if it has been around for such a long time.

Legarie asks why developers like Larian, Nintendo, and FromSoftware can release something so polished while others can’t, but makes no effort to find out the answer. So let’s get into it.

Games release in imperfect states because devs either run out of money or the shareholders of their parent company mandate that a game must come out in a certain window

for one reason or another, they are often forced to start selling the game in order to pay for the completion of the game. This has been done through DLC, patches, early access, and yes, even microstransactions for ages

Devs burn through their life force trying to make this happen and it’s upsetting to see this brought up with absolute incuriosity.

How about these individual games then?

Baldur’s Gate 3, which he says launched in a polished state, actually launched in early access, which he mentions but doesn’t question in any way. The game was in early access for 3 years, getting polish and bugfixes as it went.

They sold the game for three years at $60 while it was unpolished and unfinished. Anyone could buy it.

Tears of the Kingdom - why was this so polished? Because Nintendo has literal billions of dollars in cash reserves. They can afford to take as long as they want on a game because they have the money to do so.

And since they also sell hardware, they know their games must be able to sell more Switches. That is why despite having a lot of money and time, they still crunch massively while doing this.

FromSoftware - their past success has led them to be given a blank check, and a “ready when it’s ready” attitude. Most studios are not given these sorts of timelines.

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