Baldur's Gate 3 by Larian Games

Grabbit Allworth said:

In a year or two we're going to see some extraordinary campaign mods for BG3. Solasta is a much smaller game and many of the campaign mods available for it are exceptional and exponentially better than the base game (and expansions). Even Neverwinter Nights had some truly amazing campaign mods.

It's mind-boggling that a single person or very small group can produce content of a length, scope, scale, and quality that rivals a 250 man professional game development studio.

I sincerely hope that the success of BG3 has greatly revitalized the party-based Iso-rpg genre. I don't need a BG3 every time, but a Wasteland 3, Rogue Trader, Pillars of Eternity, or Wrath of the Righteous every other year would be more than acceptable.

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I’m also impressed what single individuals come up with in mods, and how they do it quickly. I’m not so surprised about large teams being slow and full of stupid decisions though.

One anecdotal observation from my job. There was an initiative at work to improve several processes in a particular underperforming group of machines. They made a large committee of like 20ish people who would all tackle various things they had identified as problems. They would meet weekly for several months and no action items were getting completed, no changes made. They wasted half a year and got nothing accomplished other than identifying problems. I was not apart of any of this, just got updates from those who were.

My boss who was the head of the whole thing, eventually came to me and described all the issues and how there was zero progress and asked if I would take control of it and drive all the changes because he’s seen me fix shit like this in the past. I said yes (didn’t real feel like I could say no) and started. I didn’t have any committee to answer to, I just made decisions and did things myself. I even identified and fixed a few huge problems the committee either missed completely or didn’t make action items for. I had made several large changes within the first two weeks and several more within a couple months. People that work in that machine area are blown away and think I’m some kind of miracle worker and I’m just like no, all it takes is for someone to make a fucking decision and follow through on it. I didn’t have a single meeting, I didn’t ask for permission once I decided on a course of action, I’d talk to a few machine operators to understand what they’re up against and ask for their ideas and then I’d just say “ok here’s what we’re going to try”. When there is a committee everyone’s scared to actually make a decision, it becomes meetings upon meetings discussing shit instead of doing it.

I’m sure that happens a ton in these studios with hundreds or thousands of people and why these huge studio games are 99% dog shit. Unless there is someone with a strong personality and vision driving a huge team to actually do what they’re supposed to be doing and not afraid to make decisions you’re going to end up with shit products. Design/produce by committee is a recipe for failure every time.