this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Completely disagree.
Noodle is hilarious and his pregnant pauses are top-tier.
This video was specifically defending the indie dev, Nelson, that made the post that kicked this stuff off. Sure, other AAA devs responded to him, but it was Nelson that got most of the negative attention and death threats, even though his opinions were VERY measured and reasonable. It was also a criticism of the IGN guy that directed everyone's attention and pitchforks towards Nelson by cherry-picking his statements and taking them out of context.
The specifics of the length/scope of the game are honestly less important, IMO. The video is just a level-headed look at why this excellent game is so excellent, and why it's unrealistic to expect every game from now on to be like this. That, and he's trying to get gamers to chill the fuck out and stop with the death threats.
Obviously I wouldn't support death threats, but moving on...
Which the author didn't acknowledge or seem to understand why the IGN video was calling out AAA devs.
It's realistic to expect the likes of Bethesda and BioWare to meet a lot of expectations from Baldur's Gate 3. Or rather, it's fair to hold those games to certain standards that Baldur's Gate 3 manages, but none of us should expect those studios to meet those standards, because they haven't shown they're interested in meeting those standards. BioWare made Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and Neverwinter Nights, D&D games with cooperative multiplayer, like Baldur's Gate 3, with no reliance on the publisher's server to play. When multiplayer shows up in Mass Effect though, it's some microtransaction-fueled horde mode instead of just replicating a tabletop RPG and letting your buddies play the other members in your squad on missions; Fallout 76 was Bethesda's idea of multiplayer Fallout, which is far worse. You can make decisions in games from those studios, but their character sheets have been sanded down, as have skill checks, and outside of putting a bucket on someone's head in Bethesda games, you often can't use the systems to get creative like you can in Baldur's Gate 3 or a tabletop RPG. It's fair to hold these games to those standards. Given the success of games like Disco Elysium and Kickstarter games like Torment: Tides of Numenera, I don't think anyone's really expecting scope and scale like BG3 from indie efforts, but those games do let you feel like you can play them your own way in a way that AAA's most expensive efforts often don't. That's what this argument always felt like to me from the perspective of the IGN video which, once again, was not the progenitor of the argument, even if it had the most eyes.