Yes, fantasy RPG sequels are inbound. It’s pretty much a dead cert that Bioware won’t be involved, as they’re busy being owned by EA these days, and Atari seem to have clung on the Dungeons & Dragons license without ‘em. Infogrames-in-disguise are definitely planning to revisit these two seminal roleplaying names however, though a developer’s not been announced. Neither has a release date. Maybe not next year, according to Atari’s Phil Harrison, but soon, and for the rest of your life. Or at least as long as Wizards of the Coast keep on letting ‘em make D&D games, anyway.
There being a third Neverwinter Nights wasn’t much of a shocker, given NWN2 expansions are still coming out in a slow, steady stream and, from what I gather, being fairly well-received. We’d also heard plenty of quiet rumours about a new Baldur’s Gate, but the question is what form will it take?
Will it really be akin to the BGs of yore – which original devs Bioware are aiming to revisit with their own Dragon Age – or will it be more like the hacky-slashy-Diablo-y Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance thingums that proved to be an agreeably mindless romp on the last generation of consoles? I’d actually lean more towards the latter, otherwise Atari risks having two fairly similar games – unless they’re planning on something like that Civilization IV/Colonization thing. Neverwinter Nights 3: Baldur’s Gate? Nah, seems far too obtuse. So right now, I’d bank on BG3 being something different from the cRPG norm.
So that’s Fallout and Baldur’s Gate both sequelised for the modern age. Pretty much leaves Planescape: Torment, then. That could get messy…
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I guess it could be a sequel in the way that Knights of the Old Republic 2 was a sequel to its predecessor – i.e. have it take place in the same world, which has been strongly affected by the events of the earlier game.
As long as they don’t sell it as that greatest of all fantasy clichés, “the final chapter in the epic trilogy!”
Actually, thinking about the occurance of 4th Ed, I wonder if developers could use the Open Gaming License portions of 3rd Ed as rule set – although this would probably preclude using any of the settings owned by Hasbro – shame that Wiess & Hickman sold Dragonlance back to them, really…
I think as generic fantasy settings go, Forgotten Realms is a pretty okay one. The sheer weight of source material is enough to keep it relatively sweet-smelling, if not exactly fresh.
@Larington, I seem to remember the writer and producer of the Throne of Bhaal saying much the same thing – That the story was ended, the characters too powerful to do anything exciting with without breaking the world and that they were well, tired.
That said BG was always about the location, not necessarily the protagonist. BG II had about the best realised virtual city, outside a MMO, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting.
I’ve played quite a few D&D based CRPGs, and Neverwinter Nights 2 was the last one. I don’t think I can take another one. Am I alone in not liking the D&D ruleset being used in a CRPG? I just find it annoying that my computer is just rolling dice for me. Can’t a better, original RPG system be created?
Unfortunately, I’m also completely burnt out by the standard fantasy setting. Early in Torment you meet an old lady who tries to send you on a fantasy game fetch quest for a msytical sword. She pretty much parodies the plot to every fantasy RPG in existence. I’m tired of going to defect the Evil Wizard of Yzlentizy to recover the Saber of Yorz or whatever. How about a new setting, and an interesting RPG system that takes advantage of my CPU.
I don’t mind the dice-rolling. What I mind is the stereotypes, badly drawn characters and boring stories. Put somewhat bluntly, I hated Neverwinter Nights 2. I loved Mask of the Betrayer. Same sort of source material and game system/engine, worlds apart in terms of writing, art design and overall quality.
I’m not interested in more Bhallspawn stuff. If there was a Baldur’s Gate 3 how about it take place in or near Baldur’s Gate. Neverwinter Nights 3? I’m fairly sure the city was blown up, or some such by the Spellplague. Unless, of course, it takes place in the past.
@Clovus
The wizard is your half-brother and the sword is your birthright.
@phil:
Actually, not really. Originally I think it was based around the setting, hence the name and the way in which the city itself was given more attention despite only turning up relatively late in the game. But in the end it was all about the people, even though Bioware didn’t manage to express it as cogently as they did in BG2.
“As for what developer would “ruin” it the least, that’s not the real issue. All future D&D games will be based on the upcoming 4th Edition, which has been accused of trying to turn the game into a sort of tabletop MMO.”
*cough*
As someone who’ DM’d 4th edition since release, I can safely say those people are fucking stupid, and can’t seem to get past the lack of fluff in the rules books, and the lack of rules in the fluff books(Which, along with Challenge Ratings/HORRENDOUSBALANCEISSUEScausedbymulticlassing, is one of the things that annoyed me most about 3rd edition.)
As someone on the Wizards board said, “P&P Games don’t fail to roleplay, players do.”
I liked all the fluff, admittedly I’m not PnP player so I just stock up on lore and the like. The lack of it bothers me. I also liked Lathander, ah well.
The thing about the rules, is that if you (and this a generic ‘you’) don’t like them, then don’t follow them. I’ve been doing this in games since I was a child, with the accordance of the other players of course.
This can create a fun/frustrating version of communist Monopoly.
Psycho: thanks for the compliment.
4th Ed is clearly after the WoW market – and no bad thing in and of itself, but it ain’t a refinement of D&D 3(.5) as the name would suggest, but a new system built up from scratch.
Biggest problem with it I hear at the moment is lack of quality modules – most of the stuff run at GenCon was straight dungeon-crawling – which should improve given time.
Maybe a Pathfinder tie-in could work…
Forgotten Realms is a meh setting, yes, but it still has plenty of potential for impressive stories – as proven by Obsidian’s Mask of the Betrayer, the best D&D game since Torment. No surprise that they shared some writers.
Where D&D games go wrong is in assuming that they should be primarily about combat. Sure, Icewind Dale was fun (if shallow) and IWD2 even had some shiny moments, but the very best D&D games have always been about story and characterization rather than wargame-ish fighting. With MotB, Obsidian has shown that it understands this and can work with it.
As for the BG setting itself…when BG3 was in development at Interplay, it had *nothing* to do with BG1 and 2 aside from using the “Baldur’s Gate” name/brand. Characters were totally different, and the game was even to take place in a different part of the FR world than the Sword Coast and Amn. At this point in the market, I think BG as a brand stands for a certain type of gameplay in the overall FR setting, not for anything directly related to Baldur’s Gate itself.
@Klaus: Arrrgh! Thanks for the spoiler alert! You’ve just ruined whatever fantasy RPG I play next.
@MeestaNob!
I think you may be on to something here!
It’s silly to have a Baldur’s Gate III if it’s only connection to the brand is the name. Then it would make more sense to call it Something Something: A Baldur’s Gate Adventure. After all, it’d be silly to call the Hobbit movie Lord of the Rings 4…
I’m beginning to think that the whole “BG legacy” was totally thanks to Black Isle. I read just recently that Interplay constantly kept rejecting BioWare’s story ideas for Baldur’s Gate, so they put their own (read: Black Isle’s) writers on the job.
I was thinking the same thing. I was never that into NWN, whereas I love the BG games to death (and, say, Fallout).
We’ll see what they’re capable of.. well, beyond what they’ve shown us already, that is.
My desire for swords and sorcery games has been pretty much permanently satiated since the BG 1 & 2 days.
Combine that with the fact that it won’t be something that is designed to recreate BG 1 & 2, it’ll be something that takes the name/”IP” and sells it with modern ideals and you have a big ol’ meh from me.
On a side note: I’m all for modern remakes. Just don’t forget what people liked about them.
“If said sequel will be to Baldur’s Gate 2 what Fallout 3 is to Fallout 2 — which is likely — then I really don’t give a shit.”
It would only work if they kept the controlled party setup and even then optional isometric view would be a must, even Bioware understands that for their spiritual successor to BG.
“I’m beginning to think that the whole “BG legacy” was totally thanks to Black Isle. I read just recently that Interplay constantly kept rejecting BioWare’s story ideas for Baldur’s Gate, so they put their own (read: Black Isle’s) writers on the job.”
I don’t know where you read that but David Gaider and co never worked at Black Isle, which served as nothing more than Interplay’s publishing label for the Baldur’s Gate PC games. Icewind Dale, Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment were pure Black Isle games yes and especially the latter game showed BI could write even better things than Bioware.
NWN wasn’t even meant to have a singleplayer campaign and other newer Bioware titles got that console taint on them. DA is their chance to get some street cred back on PC if you ask me.
@Thirith:
Of course it would be silly… they’ll call it Lord Of The Rings 0: The Hobbit ;)
I don’t think Black Isle had that much to do with Baldur’s Gate, except maybe sound/voice work.
Well, like it or not, D&D is a combat wargame. Sure, you can engage in amateur dramatics or run a lucasarts point and click adventure game on the side but the rules and content are all “turn based tactical wargame” heavy. If D&D combat isn’t going to feature then maybe they shouldn’t be making a D&D game at all; unless it’s some brand name based bait and switch operation. At least some people will be annoyed that they are not getting what they expect.
There should be Kobolds as well. Lots of Kobolds with silly voices.
BG series had a proper conclusion, they should just drop the name and call it something else.. like “Rubbish Forgotten Realms Action RPG NOW IN SPANGLY 3D!”
@Klaus
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy fluff as well. But in 3rd Edition books were damn near 50% fluff, 20% rules, than 30% rules amidst a paragraph of fluff. It got annoying, fast.
I like what they’re doing with 4th edition, If the FR Campaign Guide is any indication. Fluff books are, well, what they should be. A fluff book contains lore and the like for the group to draw upon, with some monsters and magic items to go along with it; whilst rule books are rules with some explanatory fluff.
Also, can anyone tell me who thought it was a good idea to make a Complete Mage, Complete Arcane, AND Unearthed Arcana? I’ve been flipping through them, all my copies missing indexes, trying to find the Wu Jen, whom I want to homebrew over to 4th edition.
If you strip out the story and focus on the combat circa BG/IWD, then the likes of Dawn of War 2 are far closer to them than Neverwinter Nights or Mass Effect…
Top down small squad strategy. I’d love a game along the lines of Commandos, DOW2, the new CoH expansion, etc. but where you can also ‘talk to the monsters’, and am surprised there isn’t one in development by now.
A couple of things – I keep seeing people talk about how they “haven’t been impressed with any of Bioware’s other games including NWN2″. NWN2, like KOTOR2, is not a Bioware game. Both of them were made by Obsidian. (And frankly, I think Obsidian blows the pants off Bioware in every respect except QA, although I enjoy both developers’ games.)
Secondly – Torment may be pretty old these days, but it’s a spring chicken next to the Dark Sun and Ravenloft games.
A NWN3 shipping “soon” would be a disaster, imo. NWN2 was already a rush job as is, and the series needs substantial engine changes. It’s clear that the toolkit suffered from neglect. Neverwinters are supposed to focus on the toolkit and multiplayer experiences. NWN1 took 3 or 4 years to reach it’s peek output of Modules and Persistent Worlds. The content scene for NWN2 has been slowed by a difficult and buggy editor, and is only just starting to gain momentum. A quick NWN3 would either ignore the toolset entirely and effectively kill the point of the series, or frustrate the building community with yet another half-hearted toolset.
If i wait 3 years only to get a Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 3, someone’s getting a kick in the nuts.
Atari, if your gonna spill action in my RPG, then just make it God of War style, but let me play as Minsc. Jobs a Good ‘un.
I’ve played a lot of AD&D 2nd ed and 3.0 – 3.5 CRPGs, and played six sessions of D&D 4th ed. tabletop over the course of about eight weeks. Long story short, I don’t like it one bit.
I think D&D 4th ed ignores all the best ideas from tabletop and card games, with the intent of being a tabletop MMO — an utterly pointless concept. Half my gaming group already plays WoW together, strangely they’re the same contingent that happily plays 4th ed together. Personally, I just do, not, understand it. It’s like they’re making cosmopolitan icecream, all the flavors I love, but instead of being wonderful in their own special ways they’re all mixed together by a machine into a black mound with a nasty flavor.
While I used to disregard card games as a money-sucking maw in the earth, removed from its capitalist ways it’s really a hell of a lot of fun — Cryptic Comet’s Armageddon Empires is my basis for loving the concept of card games. The wealth of options available in deck building, combined with the random factor of when those options will come into your hand, and the shifting situation on the game board, combines into an incredibly deep, interesting formula.
D&D 4th edition, however, gives you 9 powers to choose from for your class, only about 3 of the options being worthwhile, and lets you pick 3 to 5 of them. The choices are obvious — but you get more choices if you shell out 35$ for a class manual. Once you’ve made your choices, they’re always right out there in front of you. You’ve got At-Wills which will be your basic attacks (because there’s no reason to ever, ever use anything else), the Encounter powers that are 75% stronger, and Daily powers that are 125% stronger.
The anemic feat system (you have about .75 valid choices per alotted feat) are rigorously level and class-locked, just like the magical items, to ensure that every character is their own identical snowflake, exactly as good or bad as every other, and that their choices are next to meaningless in light of that. They’re different blends of DPS, area effect, mez, or heal, but all so blended together that it doesn’t frankly matter, and there’s no effective difference between two characters of the same class and level.
As a roleplaying system, you absolutely must have a book to play as every power (which is the core of the game) has its own special rules you must refer to until you’ve got it memorized. It lacks the universality of concept, everything is a “special case” with varying flanking, advantage, ‘procs’ rules, that makes it a f**king bear to learn, but once you do learn, you’re far more limited in choice than you’ve ever been with earlier or especially the recent models of D&D. Everyone is balanced, everyone is equal, and yet they all require their own special rules you need either the player guide or the class book to begin to understand.
It can’t completely fail as a tabletop game because good players and a good DM can still tell a great story with it, but the system just gets in the way. It has too many kooky-ass powers for most people to comprehend so every round is a lot of pushing figures around and consulting the manual, you’re less able to roleplay combat since every attack must be an abstracted yet specific power.
For a PC game, its many abstractions and profound lack of combat choices would be a chore. Everybody is a Warlock, you can stack weird effects onto your attack but it’s still just the same power shot through a different lens. Even having multiple spellcasting classes in 3.5 is less of a pain in the ass than managing six party members with wildly differing powers — and ultimately pointless since once you DO understand, they all play the same. I would bet it’s simpler to run, all the math’s already been done for you and you no longer have to rein in powergamers since there’s nothing to game or power about it, but you’d better tell a damned good story because it’s all the same slog to play.
That’s just my opinion, but to me, D&D for electronic RPGs is dead because the people holding the license are now intent on pushing out another edition of the books, and therefore no new 3.5 CRPGs can be made, despite the rules being inferior to everything else on the market. I’d rather play a Shadowrun CRPG (any edition) or RIFTs or World of Darkness (new or old) or HeavyGear/Silhouette, or just… damn near anything. They’re all superior systems in their own right, and the setting of 4th ed D&D has been jiggered enough that it no longer has any meaning to me, so why should I bother? Even most MMORPGs have better guts.