Wizards of the Coast’s new game is all about action, but don’t worry; the company knows people are still thirsty for Baldur’s Gate 3.
I do not envy anyone who has to justify making something these days. It’s an absolute nightmare. Because on the one hand, if you’re making say, a new video game, you have to explain to the people investing the millions of dollars into the project, how it will make those millions back (and then some) without taking any risks. But then you also have to explain to an audience of gamers that they’re getting something besides just more of the thing they already like.
And that’s like telling someone they’re getting chicken tenders when what they wanted was chicken nuggets. Unconscionable. And perhaps that is why, in a recent interview with Polygon, WotC President John Hight made sure to reassure people that WotC hasn’t forgotten that they like chicken nuggets. Shaped like dinos, even.
New Interview Reveals WotC Isn’t Done With ‘Serious cRPGS’ But is All-In on Action
And here’s where I get to be a big ol’ hypocrite. Because I absolutely am already excited to see what the new game, developed by former Respawn dev Stig Amussen, could look like. All it would have to be is kind of like Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor but with D&D skins and I’d be happy. But I know that it’ll be more than that.
So in a way, it’s already more of the thing I like. At any rate, I think it speaks highly of the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 that there’s no escaping the shadow it casts for WotC. Larian Studios raised the bar. Which WotC needed—especially after the dismal release of the Dark Alliance game. It’s clear people won’t accept a phoned-in answer.
And while no one may ever catch lightning in a bottle the way that Larian did, the important thing is to keep trying, and to keep finding new ways to catch lightning in a bottle. And it seems like that’s what’s happening, even as WotC president John Hight invokes Baldur’s Gate 3:
“Don’t get me wrong, we are going to do CRPGs that are going to be as serious as BG3. We have 50 years of DMs coming together and creating their own campaigns, and we’ve provided templates for hundreds and hundreds of monsters in D&D. The things that form the dreams and the nightmares of people, from gelatinous cubes to owl bears. So it’s really important that any manifestation of them in a game be as good as what’s in our own minds. That’s a tall order. And I think about what Stig and Patrick Murphy did on God of War 3, taking that pantheon of both gods and the crazy monsters from mythology and bringing them to life. It’s like, wow, what if we could unleash them on D&D?”
And from Amussen’s comments to Polygon, it sounds like te game has a lot of promise, going forward:
“We’re experts at melee combat, so that’s something that John got to see and it translates very well [to D&D].
When we started Giant Skull and we started with vanilla Unreal — we couldn’t take what we did with the Jedi games over to a new company. So all of those mistakes that we had made before weren’t there. We had a clean slate and we were able to build very quickly based on all of our learnings over the years before. That’s allowed us to create a motion model that’s so much faster now, so much more fluid. And it doesn’t have points where you get blocked because you don’t understand how to fix jank. It’s buttery smooth.”
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So keep an eye out for more of the upcoming, as yet untitled game. Though it’s probably still years away at this point, before you know it, it’ll be here.
Kratos would make a good D&D character. So would Cal Kestis.
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