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Baldur's Gate 3 might not be as impactful to overall RPG development as one would assume, says former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah.
In a new episode of his podcast (timestamp), Darrah makes the argument that "impact and sales are NOT the same," using the massive commercial success of Baldur's Gate 3 and what he predicts will be a "muted" influence on the RPG genre as one example.
"Baldur's Gate 3 did change the landscape in terms of who was willing to look at an RPG," he says. "It broadened the genre space quite significantly, which is awesome. But I think its impact on the way that games are actually developed is going to be more muted than people who are outside the video game industry might be expecting."
To be clear, it doesn't sound to me like Darrah is trying at all to downplay Larian's achievement, but it's true that Baldur's Gate 3 benefited from the enduring legacy of D&D and its ubiquitous name recognition, the financial backing of a major developer and years of successful crowdfunding, and decades worth of RPG experience. It sounds like he's just saying other developers who might have otherwise been heavily influenced by Baldur's Gate 3 might have a hard time pulling off a similar feat, which would limit its impact.
"In the case of Baldur's Gate 3, what it looks like is a perfect storm of factors, working together, to make this game work, some of which are externalities that aren't something that another studio can replicate," he says, using the D&D IP as one example.
"[Baldur's Gate 3] is able to do things that, at least from the [developers'] side, feel like they may not be allowed to get away with," he says, citing the game's unvoiced protagonist and "simplified" cinematics that allow for "a much greater choice base to exist."
Darrah goes on to suggest that developers might be "wrong" about "what they can get away with," but argues that they largely still see Baldur's Gate 3 as a game "that very successfully executes on what it's trying to do, but what it's trying to do isn't something that a lot of other games would be allowed to do. So as a result, I don't think it's going to have the impact that you would expect from a game that has sold as well as it has."
With Baldur's Gate 3 being less than two years old, it's very hard to measure its potential impact, but to me the game is very much the culmination of many iterative successes over the series' long history, and Baldur's Gate 3 itself just feels like the most refined, expansive expression of a core design philosophy rather than something revolutionary. Whether or not it'll prove me wrong in the future is anyone's guess.
