Wondering how I differ from the rest of you. Younger crowd? More table top experience? Or are we the same demographic but I just like different things.
You probably won't find all that much "younger crowd" here. CRPGs are a 30 and up thing apparently, statistically speaking. Which does kind of make sense because we grew up with these kinds of games. They're called "classic" for a reason. I'm in my 30s so I'm a tiny bit younger, but I share most of your opinions as far as these two games go.
I know, a lot of alleged "Betas" of other games (which are actually glorified marketing demos) have convinced you that you can still have major input on a games' design when it's already far enough along that you can play it without crashing every 2 minutes and every model has textures and animations. But that's not how development works in real life.
Quoting myself here from earlier in the discussion. I'm aware that this EA phase isn't one of these "marketing betas" and Larian really does want our feedback.
It also looks like they are ready to change up quite a bit of stuff, especially regarding combat and pacing.
What I don't think however, and what's a bit of a fallacy in this thread, is that they can afford revamping major sections of the game like a large part of the combat system or vast parts of story progression.
Tweak things, sure. Iron out bugs like falsely added proficiency bonuses or wrong calculations, tune down surface effects or give goblins less elemental flasks to throw. That's changing numbers and values, relatively easy to do and cost effective.
Maybe they'll even manage to give the party an auto jump ability, since that doesn't seem to be a minor annoyance that takes up like 2 minutes of your lifetime every 2 hours or so, but a game breaking bug that needs to be fixed instantly.
I'm quite positive however that they won't make sweeping changes to the story, call in the whole cast again to record new lines and animate new cutscenes for act 1. These actors are probably quite busy recording conversations for act 2 or 3 right now, production is in full swing and the devs have a buttload of work to do to get this even close to a finished state in a year. I'd personally expect at least 1,5 years to be optimistic. This isn't alpha or beta anymore. We (okay, most of us) weren't invited to that.
