As impressive as this unsettling feat of OCD is, most people aren't going to spend hours on end just dedicated to combing through every possible thing and for the sake of being able to make a post like this.
Most depths won't be plumbed and many containers will go unchecked, so the amount of sheer stuff that needs to exist does so to guarantee that even a player who is only a mild packrat will be able to maintain a respectable coin purse and decent resources.
So as impressive as this is and as for as good of a post as this makes for the sheer "huh, neat" factor, I really don't think that anything needs to be toned down.
Of course most people won't collect all this. But my point is kinda that this is SO much, that even if you only collected a THIRD of this, it would still be a pretty massive amount of loot for this stage of the game and this character level. Now, for some people that's really not a problem at all. I have one friend who only plays games for the loot, he wants all the loot possible, he would never, ever, think a game has too much loot. But I'm an old school D&D player, and a long-time DM. So I think in terms of game balance and what's really appropriate at a given level of character development. They won't even let us have a suit of plate mail (or splint mail!) at this point, presumably because we're "too low level for armor that expensive" or something, but they'll pack the world with 80,000 gold worth of magic stuff and cash.
With this, the colossal amount of consumable items, and all the barrelmancy stuff, and all the other weird little exploits you can do to trivialize encounters without actually having to play your characters like you would in D&D, sometimes I feel like the folks at Larian consider just using your characters' actual abilities to be BORING. Like, "sure, D&D is okay, but what if we could just use a bunch of crazy shit instead of playing characters with defined capabilities?"
Y'know, all the Larianisms were perfectly fine in the Divinity games. That was THEIR system, THEIR world, THEIR story, THEIR tone, THEIR themes, THEIR gameplay that they designed in THEIR style. And those games are great, they're tons of fun. You can't really criticize their excesses, because that's what the Divinity games are ALL ABOUT. It's their own original RPG milieu, they get to define it however they want. And I fully support them in that.
But now, they're making a D&D game. An official, licensed, D&D game, using someone else's ruleset, and someone else's world, and someone else's tone and themes and gameplay philosophy. I do NOT mind them making some house rules and adapting things to be a more enjoyable video game. To an extent. Of course they should have some creative freedom, both narratively and mechanically. But they should also pay attention to the way the source RPG feels and is designed to play, and try not to step too far away from that.
I'm not saying that they necessarily HAVE gone too far, I'm just wondering about it. I'm just pondering it. It's not terrible by any means. But it does give me pause. It makes me wonder if they really "get" D&D. Because no other D&D video game has been this Monty Haul, this quickly. You might amass a lot of stuff in other D&D titles, but you amass it by the END of the game, by the time you're high level. You don't have the contents of Elminster's Vault by level 5, 25% of the way through the game. And the reason you don't, is because that's not how D&D was designed to be played, it's not the expected experience. So I just wonder if Larian really intends this, and if so, why? It's not a Divinity game, they shouldn't just port over all of their normal game design philosophies one-for-one into a D&D product.
I'm not one of those people who are running around saying, "This isn't D&D! This is just DOS 3!" and so forth. I've argued against those people, quite a bit. I've been defending Larian in this regard, and will continue to do so. But I also think that Early Access is exactly the time when we should be having these discussions. When we should be asking these questions. When we should say, "okay hold on a second now, this might not be the best" when we feel things are off about the experience they've crafted so far. As far as I know, they WANT us to be raising these issues to attention. So let's talk about it.
