So is the point being made that the previous Baldur's Gate games which were made 20 years ago and hampered by technical limitations shouldn't have a quality of life improvement such as an obscene amount of gold laying around for the 1% of people in the game who would do something like this to capitalize on? If so, how does that affect anyone's play experience?
Those like you who would want to hunt down every last scrap of junk in the world that's available would be rewarded for their efforts by an experience filled with riches beyond their wildest dreams. In that case, if you don't want to break things so badly, you could just edit yourself and not pick up every last thing to have 80,000 gold so that you're not tempted to wipe out merchants for their best stuff.
Those unlike you, the average player, will barely run across a fraction of this stuff and will have to manage their resources more carefully. And as video game developers make things that appeal to the largest possible base in order to make sales, Larian is unlikely to tone down the junk in the world so that those casually running through the game aren't pigeonholed into poking around through every wayward barrel so that the pacing of the game doesn't get killed by monotony.
If you're asking Larian to tone down the amount of available stuff in the world because there's just too much available, how do they balance what's enough stuff so that the average player doesn't end up in a resource bottleneck because an outspoken minority of hoarders think that the gold economy is an issue?
If the point being made is that the game doesn't feel like it's faithful to D&D because too many resources are available, and you're using D:OS2's easily-exploitable economy to make the point because the games share some similarity, then I wonder about the argument that's actually being made. It comes off as "this isn't as close to a tabletop experience as I was hoping for," which is likely going to be disregarded because that was never the intent and it's not a popular point that's being made.
I mean, I applaud you for the grand exercise and extensive playtime devoted to meticulously picking things up for the sake of saying "Hey, people have access to a lot of stuff if they're patient enough to collect it all," but I don't see how that's a bad thing for anyone besides the people who are upset for some reason that players have a lot of playstyle options.
Where does this 1% number come from? Did you just make that up? Neither you or I know what the percentage is of completionist/explorer type players. I have a friend who plays RPGs who actually has OCD, and he chides me for not being completionist ENOUGH. Maybe it's 5%. Maybe it's 20%. I don't think that either of us know.
Game designers DO think about how much resources to put in their game, how much to make available at any given time, how quickly players can progress in power, how easy it is to heal, how often they can use powerful effects in battle, and so on. Every RPG developer considers these questions, makes their calculations, and decides how to answer them. And the answer that they come up with determines how the game FEELS to play. In can even determine what subgenre the game is placed in. There are games which are entirely about loot, total loot pinata games, that's what they're known for. That gives one feeling of gameplay. There are games where everything is scarce and you're struggling to survive, and that's a totally different feeling of gameplay. So every developer has to decide where they want to fall on that spectrum.
Larian put all this stuff in the game for a reason. They want people to search those containers, they want people to explore and find the hidden caches and secret items, they want people to GET the stuff. They wouldn't have spent all the time putting it in the game otherwise. If anything, maybe I'm the one playing the way the developers hoped people would. Do you think all those devs who built all those places that I found and "the average player" as you put it doesn't find, do you think they got done designing those areas and programming everything and stocking them with items and then said, "I sure hope no players find THIS place."
People don't always know what's ultimately going to be fun or satisfying for them. That's why game designers have to be smart enough to know that for them, and when they do this correctly, their game becomes beloved. Eating a piece of candy is a delight, but eating 100 pieces of candy makes you sick. Too much reward makes reward meaningless, it takes away the excitement of further rewards. When you're new in the game and you are getting your ass kicked and you have no healing potions left, and then you FIND a healing potion, you're thrilled. You're so grateful to have found a healing potion! But when you have 200 healing potions, and you find one, you don't give even the slightest shit about it, you might not even bother to pick it up. Treasure has become trash.
If more was always better, devs would just give you everything right away. Every rat would drop 1,000,000 gold, because hey, why not, people like getting loot, right? But they don't do that, because it would cheapen the game, eliminate a sense of progression, and remove the aspirational aspect of working toward something and then having the satisfaction of eventually getting it. But as you say, "how do they balance what's enough stuff"? Right? That's the tricky part. That's what they're getting paid to figure out. And Early Access is the time when those very questions are still up in the air. They asked for our feedback. These forums are here for us to discuss these things. Just as it's appropriate for people to say, "we think you made X fight too hard" or "we think you should change how Disengage works" or any other balancing issue, it's no less appropriate to bring up the topic of loot density. Because maybe this isn't the best they could do, and maybe it's more than 1% of people who think so.
