this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3
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All things BG3!
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
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And the recent D&D movie was basically free advertising for Larian.
Less of it than Hasbro anticipated, though.
There's pretty big overlap between the kind of people who play PC games or even a lot of console games and who may be interested in this other genre of games, and especially the biggest name in that genre. It didn't translate to the general public, though.
Which is crazy to me because the DnD movie was better than both Avatar movies IMO and those are 2 of the top 3 grossing movies of all time
Moviegoers are a fickle audience.
"Dungeons & Dragons" just doesn't have the kind of appeal outside of geek circles that it does within it. There's still a stigma there, even if it's lessened, and different from what it used to be.
And, like, you need a lot more people to show up to a theatre to make money on a summer blockbuster than you do logging in to Twitch to watch you play a game.
Honestly, the BG3 PS5 launch may do more for D&D than anything else in the last few years. Critical Role, and shows like it, have cracked the door open and made 5E a big seller, and that's naturally aided the BG3 PC launch immensely, but the current hype around BG3 could push sales of the console version of the game into a whole order of magnitude more hands that have never ever considered even looking at a d20. No one is calling the game D&D BG3, so it won't have that stigma that the movie did. It does lack the level of D&D branding that BG1 and 2 had, but anyone who starts the game and starts looking up things online about it will come across the name repeatedly.
The game will further break down the walls. The potential for this to come full circle and boost Live Play views and D&D book sales is not small.
D&D as a name means nothing to me, because it's so close to the "baseline" for what fantasy is, that it's hard to say it really has much of an identity of its own....
That said, you're creative and know how to just go all-in on what a fantasy universe can do for you... you can get some amazing results, like BG3 and the recent D&D movie
It's also a great primer for the game itself. It introduces Faerun and (most) of the races while being a fun story in its own right. Although I have played Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights back in the day I (re)watched the movie before starting BG3 and it was a nice apéritif to the main course.