Dragon Age lead says Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur prove publishers wrong as games can crush market trends if they’re “given time to cook”

Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are both RPGs that have taken the world by storm. At the time of writing, Larian’s RPG has over 15 million players and Expedition 33 is predicted to sell a total of 10 million copies.

In an interview with GamesRadar, Dragon Age narrative lead David Gaider explained that both of these games completely destroy the publisher way of thinking. With publishers obsessed with numbers and trends, BG3 and Clair Obscur prove what can happen if talented developers are simply “given time to cook”.

More games need more time to cook

Gaider explained that their time at EA and BioWare saw publishers questioning entire genres due to previous records. Instead of allowing a team like Dragon Age to expand and evolve, the team would be told that their genre simply “caps out” at a specific number with no room for growth.

“The sales for BG3 were amazing,” the Dragon Age writer explained, “and kind of make a lie out of – I remember when I was at EA, there was a lot of investigation into how large is the RPG audience, and how large is the action audience, and so forth. And they would have an estimate and they’d say it caps out, oh, the RPG audience caps out at about 5 million. But that doesn’t seem to be true when the game is good.”

“They don’t care about appealing very, very strongly to a specific audience. They want mass appeal.”

DRAGON AGE LEAD WRITER DAVID GAIDER

The writer explained that Clair Obscur and Baldur’s Gate 3 both prove that a quality game can expand the audience of a genre. Not only are the two games “love letters to their genres”, but they’re also combinations of years of experience and modern trends.

“[They show] what’s possible when a game is given time to cook, when it’s allowed to develop,” the veteran developer said. “BG3 was pretty exceptional in that it had a very long period on Early Access, a couple of years, I think, where it was able to respond to player feedback and develop past the point where, if they were under a publisher, they probably would have been forced out the door and it would have been a much different experience.”

Of course, just because game publishers can see the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur, that doesn’t mean that the industry is about to change tact.

“When you have a publisher hanging over your head, they’re looking for very specific things,” Gaider says. “They want mass appeal. They don’t care about appealing very, very strongly to a specific audience. They want mass appeal. They want to feel comfortable, de-risk it by imagining how the appeal translates to many different kinds of audiences, which I think often kind of ends up diluting the very specific things a game can do.”

The Dragon Age lead explained that both Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur do appeal “very, very strongly to that one audience” but that appeal is so strong and so high quality that it ends up expanding the core audience. It’s a major risk for a studio, especially if you’re a AAA studio pumping tens of millions of dollars into a project, but sometimes a risk pays off.

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