I must have missed the part of the article that claims (and even less proves) that mechanics are set in stone.
It's a read between the lines situation.
So allow me to read between the lines:
They didn't do what I wanted, and so no matter what, it's going to be bad.
A pure implementation is impossible, w/out requiring a human at the helm, since that's how D&D works out here in everyone is flesh and blood instead of pixels land. I've watched a few streams of OXventurers playing D&D, and the follow up video by the guy that DMs them, talking about how players can mess up your campaign w/out even thinking that's what they're doing. There are an infinite number of ways that an encounter can be handled in a table top setting, and those variables cannot be baked in. Even in my tabletop days, we had situations that the GM couldn't foresee, all within the rules of the game, but not something that was accounted for.
It's funny to read about barrels and such. It's like people honestly believe that these things never existed until Larian magically implemented them. As far as how items we find in game bear a striking resemblance to items in DOS, I had a twinge about that yesterday, and then realized that rather than spend the money remaking every asset they had available in engine already, they just used them, and you know what? I'm fine with that. If people really want to be down on a game developer for allowing things like oil slicks to be lit on fire, then they should really start with Obsidian. I mean, you could literally lay traps like that out in the castle defense in NWN 2. I'd suggest maybe Obsidian stole that idea from Larian, but I'm fairly sure that NWN 2 came first... I'm just going to pretend that I'd never seen exploding barrels in any other games, or genres, before that.
