Former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider is not known to be shy about sharing his opinions, and so he did in April, saying that is "kind of to JRPGs what was to CRPGs." Not everyone took the statement quite as he meant it, though, and so speaking recently to , Gaider clarified that what he meant was simply that both games are "kind of love letters to their genre that allow what they've created to translate to a larger audience than what that genre normally hits."
"The sales for Baldur's Gate 3 were amazing, 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," Gaider said. "And they would have an estimate and they'd say it caps out, oh, the RPG audience
caps out at about five million. But that doesn't seem to be true when the game is good."
"I think there's such a thing as expanding the audience, as opposed to treating the audience as this finite number of people, right?" he said. "And I think that's what Expedition 33 really does. I think it manages to take the elements of JRPGs—and I don't think it's doing a lot of new things, honestly. It's taking a number of more recent trends and kind of bundling them up in an interesting way that I think makes it very accessible to people who normally wouldn't play JRPGs."
He's not wrong. Coming up [[link]] on two years after its full release, Baldur's Gate 3 remains among the , and while Clair Obscur has only been around for a month it's right up there too, posting enviable numbers for what should by rights be a relatively niche RPG—and both are rolling with "overwhelmingly positive" user ratings on top.