'There's almost nobody left': CEO of Baldur's Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke says the D&D team he initially worked with is gone, due to Hasbro layoffs

Larian pls make a new series based on the Pathfinder ruleset. I think the success of BG3 has helped the mainstream to get used to DnD ruleset. Although Pathfinder is more complex, I think they have the chops to make it more accessible to the masses.

I've been browsing older Forgotten Realms sourcebooks and the love that the authors put into those is amazing. It hurts to see D&D and the worlds I grew up loving destroyed by a soulless entity that cares only about profit.

You see, if they fire everyone from the division, it'll make even more profit. ez

I think Barbie would like a word

Also, when your company is ailing (read: Not making more profit than last year, no matter what ocean of money your managers are swimming in), fire the good parts. That'll fix it!

I've survived layoffs at companies where we were told that following the cuts, we were going to get leaner and more agile and more efficient.

I'm sure you'll be just shocked to learn that what actually happened is I ended up doing twice as much work to pick up the laid off people's slack, and at the end of the year got a smaller bonus than the previous year, along with a raise that didn't cover inflation. Overall company profits, of course, hit a record high.

Shout-out to Pathfinder, paizo, and their new license!

"The whole point of the ORC is to give the gaming community comfort, confidence, and certainty,” the licence states. “It gives our community a license that is not reliant on any one company.”

The OGL License happened after Larian teamed up with Hasbro to make Baldur's Gate 3. Thankfully Larian is still independent so it can continue on to make better RPGs without Hasbro.

This is mostly a USA problem. :) There are so many great pnp systems out there. But there will be a learning curve.

I don't think it's too controversial to suggest that 5e mechanics are not the strength of BG3. It would be arguably praised more if it kept the world design of BG3 and replaced the combat to have the spell scope of DO2 with the basic actions of 5e (aka shove, which arguably BG3 tweaked anyway to make it fun in combat)

I'll miss the design approach of the game but BG3 was just a big advertisement to how good a D:OS3 will be

I made the change almost a year ago now after all the OGL nonsense they tried to pull and I honestly believe Pathfinder is a much more fun game. My entire table enjoys it more than 5e and they are a real variety of different player types.

I'm so ready to get the kind of polish and mastery that BG3 has applied to a new game in the Divinity universe. I haven't finished DOS3, not by a Longshot and don't have time to play it, but it blew me away and I think about playing it again often. I will one day. It is daunting when you haven't played a game like that in a while, to continue on. Especially on the harder difficulties lol RIP. Larian is the GOAT game studio up there with From Software and the Zelda team imo.

I've almost bought DIvinity Original Sin a couple of times, is it any good?

This just reads to me that Divinity Original Sin 3 is on the far horizon. YES

MtG made over a billion dollars. From what I can see WotC, products/services/licenses, make up over 3 billion of Hasbro's 5.something billion revenue.

spoiler alert though, it's literally everybody. because everyone else is doing it, it's not possible to survive as a business in a competitive space without doing, for lack of a better word, the devil's work. It will take a major social disruption to change this, but it won't happen in an organized fashion because we as a species are pathetic. The disruption will be the end of the world - North America cracking down the middle due to all the fracking, the Greenland glacier sliding into the ocean all at a go, something like that. FAFO endgame shit, due any minute now anyway.

Honestly its kind of extremely crumby that hasbro owns the wizards

The DnD games from the 90s on steam went up in price because of the success of BG3 they are now on sale forbtheir old price lol

Good luck avoiding most of them. They own everything.

Nestle doesn't just make Chocolate...

Samsung, Ubisoft, Epic, Chiquita, Dole, Apple, ...

Pretty much any big corp is gonna be really shitty...

Create a github repo, put eveey company in the readme

All of them.

Thank you! The CEOs' children need Maseratis, boarding school, college, jet fuel to pedo islands, and so many other necessities! We can't let them suffer!

I kept trying to figure out the joke about the name Swen Vincke and was failing. Cocks. It was right there in front of me everyone. It was Cocks.

You misunderstand. Larian is the company that made the BG3 video game, and they haven't laid people off.

However it's a licensed game. Baldur's Gate and D&D are IPs that are owned by a company called Wizards of Coast. And Wizards is owned by Hasbro. Hasbro is forcing layoffs at Wizards, specifically on the D&D team because it doesn't print money as efficiently as say, Magic the Gathering does.

The people at Wizards, i.e the people who actually make D&D are no doubt passionate wonderful people. But Hasbro (and probably some of the Wizards management) are awful corporate parasites determined to suck every last penny from their properties.

They don't give a shit how loved a product is, if it's not making $100M per year then it's basically worthless to them and they won't fund it. So layoffs happen.

That's two separate products and companies you're thinking about...

Larian Studios is not owned by anyone. The Wizards of the coast team that Larian worked with has been laid off

TSR, which was the company that originally made D&D got bought by Wizards of the Coast, which made Magic the Gathering. Then Wizards got bought by Hasbro.

Every product you love has been acquired by a large company that got bought by a larger company and then turned to shit. Until the government stops blocking mergers and acquisitions, this trend will continue.

It’s the D&D team at Wizards of the Coast, not at Larian.

I guess this is reddit and you don't know how to read past the headlines?

About a week ago you decided to make your lemmy account. A better idea would've been to learn how to fucking read.

I'll take "I have no fucking idea what I'm talking about" for $500, Alex

Maybe reread the article

You…You might want to consider reading the article.

Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, who own DnD. Larian, a completely separate company, got the rights to make BG3 from Hasbro. Hasbro laid off nearly everyone Larian Studios worked with at Wizards of the Coast.

Try re-reading the headline again :)

Please tell me everyone has figured out that all large companies are pure fucking evil

Fixed that for you

I upvoted you out of pitty. Hope your motel bed is comfortable.