As opposed to what?

Because the “interesting story” games also did all that work. Thankfully. Good visuals and good stories are both… you know, good art.

Apparently we’ve gone all the way around, because there has been no numbered Baldur’s Gate game that wasn’t AAA as absolute fuck.

This sentence makes my brain hurt. They co-opted it how? You’re just entirely unwilling to engage with any piece of media the far right actually likes just on principle? As in, regardless of how… not far right the piece of media itself happens to be?

I hate this century. This century sucks.

“A couple exceptions”? Over “the past few years”?

What rock have you been living under? I barely kept up with great 2025 games as it is.

“Almost like” and “behaving like an independent studio” is vastly different from being one.

Well, yes it is.

That is exactly how being things and not being things are.

If you go with “well, it’s not an indie, but it behaves like one in my view” as selection criteria, then the remainder of “AAA” you are left with by that tautological selection process is by definition made up of whatever bad habits you’ve arbitrarily determined to be “bad AAA behavior”.

I’m very happy that the guy jives with CDPR. Good for him. But what he’s found is a AAA studio that works in ways he likes, not a “semi-indie” studio that just happens to own a first party platform (until last week, anyway), make massive games and be publicly owned.

If you define AAA as “studios that do bad things I don’t like” you can’t expect to be taken seriously when you complain about how all AAA studios are doing things you don’t like.

The series was very good, but it was still a low budget project. BG1 was developed for an estimated $1.5-3M. BG2 was developed for $7M. I can’t even find budgets for Icewind Dale or Planescape: Torment.

But compare that the BG3’s $100M budget (closer to $200M after marketing).

These were great games, but they were largely indie games. None of them had AAA budgets back in the 90s. Even at the scale of the era, Ultima XI cost $12M to produce. The OG FF7 cost $45M.

By that metric there were maybe two AAA PC games in all of 1998. BG1 you can make the case (but given that it was an Interplay-published, licensed game meant for relatively performant hardware, it was absolutely in line with AAA PC releases of the day). BG2? Absolutely not. Bordering on eight digits in 2000 was not a small game at all. And of course neither were independent games by definition.

For sure BG3 is absurdly large and the historical comparisons break down a bit in the sheer scale of what that thing is. But nobody in the late 90s was buying a top down D&D CRPG with the production values of BG (or an action RPG in the vein of Diablo the previous year) and thinking they were slumming it in the dregs of small budget gaming.

By that metric there were maybe two AAA PC games in all of 1998.

There were a lot fewer, certainly. FF7 was the heavyweight. Zelda: Ocarina, MGS, and StarCraft were in the running. Shenmu (produced a year later) had a budget north of $47M (the high fluctuation in Yen value making this a hard calculation).

But you wouldn’t see truly big budget gaming until GTA4 crested the nine digit mark.

Bordering on eight digits in 2000 was not a small game at all.

The difference between $7M and $47M is a buncha lotta money.

MGS only made it to Windows in 2000. OoT obviously never did, officially.

Where I was, the games running in demo PCs and net cafés in 98/99 were Quake 3, Unreal and, believe it or not, yeah, Baldur’s Gate. Because BG1 already had pretty much the same MP as BG3 and people would pay per seat to play co-op runs of the original.

For the PC crowd BG1 and Starcraft were on a pretty even playing field in terms of scope perception.

The thing is, at the time counting budgets wasn’t much of a consideration. For one thing, most of them weren’t publicly known at all, beyond the extreme outliers you mention. People took notice when 50 mill were broken because that was such a high water mark for so long, but if AAA was a concept at all (it wasn’t), it certainly had more to do with branding and promotional materials. Having ads on good old normie broadcast TV did more to sell the size of FF7 than how big it was.

Ultimately BG was a major release. It came from a familiar publisher, it had a recognizable license, it had the same gaming magazine coverage as other major releases of the year, and it got a ton of critical praise and buzz across the industry. It didn’t come across as scope-constrained at all. FF7 was on another level entirely, but that was true of pretty much every other game release.

Also, FWIW, OoT wasn’t that big of a deal where I am, and neither was the N64 in general. GoldenEye and Turok drove more attention than OoT, and neither of those were particularly relevant, either. You would have definitely had much more luck getting people to recognize Baldur’s Gate than OoT over here in 1999.